The American Bar Association: Duped by the Soviets?

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510 May 19, 1986 THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION DUPED BY THE
SOVIETS INTRODUCTION Accelerated cultural, academic, and
professional exchanges be tween the United States and the Soviet
Union have been the major concrete result of last Novemberls
superpower summit if properly designed, should be welcomed and
could improve U.S. and Soviet understanding of each other. The
American Bar Association ABA h owever is about to provide a sorry
example of how not to conduct exchanges with the Soviets Such
exchanges On May 26, an ABA delegation departs for Moscow to meet
with the IIAssociation of Soviet Lawyers.l! To all appearances,
this will be a meeting betwe e n two equivalent professional
associations-attorneys from two different countries. Here, however,
the appearances deceive. There is little equivalence between the
U.S. association and the Soviet association. What has happened, in
fact, is that the ABA has been duped. In being lured to Moscow, the
ABA is extending the mantle of legitimacy to the Soviet legal
system. It is a system of organized illegality, constantly used
throughout its history and until the present day by the Communist
Party and secret poli c e to suppress basic freed0ms.h disregard of
the letter of Soviet law. The Soviet legal system, for example, has
never.acquitted a defendant charged with a political offense.
Trials of political offenders in the Soviet Union are uniformly
characterized by a mockery of justice, with evidence in favor of
the defendant ignored by the judges, and the sentence predetermined
by the KGB secret police.

Within this sham Soviet legal system, the Soviet attorney is a
willing accomplice of the repressive state. There i s no similarity
between the members of the Association of Soviet Lawyers and their
counterparts in the U.S Britain, France, Italy, or anywhere else in
the West. By treating the Association as if there are similarities
the American Bar Association violates and undermines the very goal
of cultural exchanges-to improve U.S. understanding of the Soviet
Union.

Instead, the ABA contributes to the continued misperception in
the U.S. of the nature of the Soviet legal system WHAT IS THE
ASSOCIATION OF SOVIET LAWYERS?

Unlike the ABA, which is a working organization of American
lawyers, the ASL is not simply an organization create d to pursue
the professional interests of its members. Rather, the ASL was
organized specifically in the mid-1970s to conduct Soviet
propaganda in foreign countries. According to Dina Kaminskaya, a
former defense attorney in the Soviet Union, who was forc e d into
exile because of her defense of Soviet human rights activists,
those invited to join the ASL were among the most Ilpolitically
reliable" lawyers. Not a single lawyer who had shown eden minimum
independence regarding the KGB was included in the ASL.

ASL AND HUMAN RIGHTS From the very beginning, the ASL has
concentrated on fomenting anti-American spy mania and anti-Semitism
in the Soviet Union. In 1979, the ASL published the White Book on
Soviet Jewry. In it Soviet Jews who sought to emigrate were sai d
to be inspired by Western Ilintelligence services,Il while American
newsmen George Krimsky and Alfred Friendly, Jr., were branded VIA
agents.Il The ASL book described Western tourists who meet Soyiet
Jews as subversive agents and Jewish activists as Wes tern
spies.

Last year, just as the American Bar Association was signing its
May 2 agreement with the ASL that led to this month's trip to
Moscow the ASL was teaming up with the Soviet Anti-Zionist
Committee, one of the most virulent anti-Semitic operations since
the defeat of Hitler to publish the second edition of the White
Book. In the preface, A Sukharev, now ASL president, and D.
Dragunskiy, a Soviet Army general who chairs the Anti-Zionist
Committee, praised the 1975 U.N resolution equating Zionism wi t h
racism and called upon "the Soviet people to rebuff Zionist
provocateur Soviet Jews who have sought to emigrate but have been
refused permission to do so (so-called refuseniks) are living in
luxury because of the lIpresentsl* they receive from Ilforeign
Zionists.

Teaching Jewish children Hebrew and Judaism, states the ASL
Anti-Zionist Committee book, is #'a blatant attempt to affect the
According to the book 1. Belava knim (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya
literatura, 1979 pp. 172-230 2 psyche of minors in a relig ious and
nationalistic way."

United States,2declares the book is a land of
government-sponsored anti-Semitism. Although there are tens of
thousands of Soviet Jews who want to leave the Soviet Union, the
ASL's White Book states that Jewish emigration has ended.

Publication of this book is part of a new KGB campaign to
demoralize Soviet Jews and extinguish their hopes for preserving
their religious and cultural identity. It is reported that the
American Bar Association's officials were aware of the books' e
xistence when they planned this month's visit to the ASL And the
What the Americans certainly should have known was the ASL',s
whitewashing of Soviet human rights violations. ASL President
A.

Sukharev addressed an April 1986 special meeting of journalists
from communist and pro-communist Third World nations need to
promote the Soviet concept of human rights, which ignores the
fundamental freedoms including the rule of law at the heart of
Western civilization He lectured on the WHAT ASL REALLY DOES Unlike
t he American Bar Association, which is a completely private group,
the ASL is part of Soviet officialdom. Its President A. Sukharev,
is Minister of Justice of the Russian Federation (the largest of
the Soviet republics) and'thus is directly responsible for
administering Soviet-style "justice I' His previous job was as a
bureaucrat on the Central Cobittee of the-Communist Party. His
deputy at ASL, Samuil Zivs, also serves as Vice President of the
Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee and has written a number of atta cks
on Soviet human rights activists.

The ABA treats Zivs as a colleague. Yet Zivs has stated that
Andrei Sakharov, perhaps the Soviet Union's most famous persecuted
dissident, has been sent into internal exile in sfull conformity
with...the legal norms In truth, Sakharov never has been charged
with any crime, never has faced any court of law, and never was
given a chance to defend himself. Though Sakharov has been forced
to live in isolation and has been subjected to mental and physical
torture by the KGB , Zivs describes his treatment as "lenient As
for the Jewish refusenik Anatoly Shcharansky, who was imprisoned
for nine years before being allowed to emigrate, Zivs calls him a
paid agent of the CIA. And when Anatoly Koryagin, a Soviet doctor,
was thrown i n to prison for speaking out against Soviet abuses of
psychiatry for 2. Belava knim (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literatura,
1985 pp. 10, 13, 249-251, 58-60 90 3punishing dissidents, Zivs
accused him of preparing to engage in terrorism. Zivs even has
lashed out a t Amnesty International for llpoisoning people's minds
with the disinformation about the Soviet Union Does the American
Bar Association's delegation to Moscow know what kind of
individuals they are embracing as colleagues when they meet
Sukharev and Zivs?

ASL OBJECTIVES Ostensibly, the ABA is going to Moscow to promote
cooperation "in the areas of mutual professional interest." The
ASL, of course, is not interested in educating Soviet lawyers about
the guaranteed liberties in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the
independent U.S judiciary. The ASL has other goals. First, with the
collapse of the mass "peace movementsf in the West, the Soviet
propaganda machinery has shifted to target elite professional
groups in democratic countries to manipulate them into suppor t ing
Soviet international objectives. Second, the Soviets seem
determined to counter the increasingly widespread recognition
throughout the world that Moscow massively violates the human
rights of its citizens A critical element of what Soviets call
their " counterpropaganda offensive" to gain respectability is
contact with Western.groups that creates for the Soviet Union the
aura of moral equivalence with the West. This Moscow has achieved
with the ABA-ASL exchange agreement that equates the perpetrators
of illegalities in the Soviet Union with American lawyers
CONCLUSION I The American Bar Association's pact with the ASL, says
Harvard law professor Alan Derschowitz, "has made a mockery" of the
cause of thousands of political prisoners, religious dissidents,
human rights activists, and refuseniks...who risk their freedom and
life on a daily basis precisely to show the world that the Soviet
legal system deserves no mutual respect from freedom-loving systems
like our own.If In short, it gives legitimacy to the S oviet system
of judicial terror. delegation, including Sukharev and Zivs, a
visit with Chief Justice Warren Burger at the Supreme Court. And
subsequently, Burger's office proposed to the State Department a
Soviet-American exchange program on penal reform I In fact, the ABA
connection already has won an ASL 3. Samuil Zivs, The Anatomv of
Lies (Moscow: Progress, 1984 pp. 103, 46, 154 4- There is a
fundamental asymmetry in exchanges between U.S. public groups and
Soviet pseudo-public groups. The former almost surely are driven by
curiosity, good-intentions, or self-interest. The latter are guided
solely by Kremlin foreign policy needs agreement demonstrates, an
American public group with little understanding of Soviet affairs
can undermine U.S. objectives of p r omoting and defending human
rights and fundamental freedoms while and values are advanced As
the ABA-ASL the objectives of a foreign government hostile to
American secur;ty I It would be very inappropriate for the U.S.
government to restrict the freedom o f American citizens to meet
with official Soviet groups such as ASL. Yet U.S. groups could be
given authoritative organizations. With such information, U.S.
groups could make wiser decisions regarding exchanges with the
Soviets. To this end, the U.S.

Congr ess should consider establishing a bipartisan Advisory
Board on U.S.-Soviet Exchanges, comprised of representatives of
government and the private sector sophisticated, and unbiased
advice on the nature of Soviet I I In the short run, if the ABA
respects t h e principles of law that it represents as well as the
interests of the free world, it should cancel its exchange with the
ASL. The ABA then should insist that any future exchanges with the
Soviets not be conducted through the ASL and that they include on t
he Soviet side, independent individuals I committed to furthering
human rights inside the U.S.S.R. as guaranteed by the 1975 Helsinki
Final Act which Moscow signed U.S. attorneys to the Soviet Union
should have the sane access to individuals as do Soviet delegations
to the U.S to be duped by Moscow Delegations of I To settle for
anything less is to mock the purpose of cultural exchanges and to
ask Mikhail Tsypkin, Ph.D.